Having hit the international jackpot with "The Woman in Black," the revived Hammer Films label follows up with a title that lacks that haunted house picture's familiarity of source material, highly accessible premise and equivalently marketable star. Instead, "The Quiet Ones" presents rising actor Sam Claflin as an average guy participating in an ethically dubious scientific experiment into psychic disturbance.

May 1974, Oxford. Local lad Brian McNeil (Claflin), who works in the university's audiovisual unit, is projecting archival research material to accompany a lecture delivered by paranormal psychology expert Joseph Coupland (Jared Harris). Would the young man be willing to film the professor's potentially groundbreaking work with a profoundly disturbed woman named Jane Harper (Olivia Cooke, "Bates Motel")? The treatment seems less than academically rigorous — for some reason Jane is subjected to au courant hits such as Slade's "Cum on Feel the Noize" at deafening volumes — but an intrigued Brian agrees.

After getting shut down by a nervous university establishment, Coupland's pet project is happily relocated to more photogenic accommodations in a sprawling country estate. There, the professor, the cameraman and two romantically entangled students — Krissi (Erin Richards) and Harry (Rory Fleck-Byrne) — hunker down with traumatized Jane in a bid to monitor and extract her "negative brain energy." "Cure one patient, we cure mankind," declares a messianic Coupland.

Exactly how the university employees and students are able to abruptly abandon their jobs and studies in the middle of the summer term — or where, for that matter, Brian's footage (which is in fact shot digitally) is being developed and printed — is left to the viewer's imagination. Instead, attention is pulled toward the highly arresting Jane and her malignant alter ego, Evey, who resides in a child's plastic doll. Brian is clearly smitten by Jane, but he's warned away by Coupland, whose own wandering libido suggests he's not likely to live to see the end credits.

An easy diagnosis for Jane would be demonic possession, especially when Krissi's bath water is raised to the boiling point, even after she and Harry have returned to the ostensible safety of campus. Really, just how far can Jane's negative telekinetic energy go? But Coupland resists any supernatural explanations, stubbornly clinging to his own scientific hypothesis.

The presence of Brian's camera gives director John Pogue ("Quarantine 2: Terminal") plenty of opportunity to throw in found-footage verite as well as jittery hand-held sequences, and few will worry too much about the film's lax standards with regard to its self-filmed conceit. Some may wonder, however, how Brian's camera projects a flashlightlike beam up and down darkened staircases.

The opening credits make use of that oft-abused expression "inspired by actual events," and indeed, the story here is based on an actual case in which Toronto researchers attempted to harvest their own emotional energy. The big leap from that particular scientific investigation to the freaky occurrences depicted here needn't trouble us unduly, but the fact remains that Dr. A.R.G. Owen's real-life "Philip Experiment" doesn't sound interesting enough to give Lionsgate and Hammer much of an additional marketing hook equivalent to, say, the paranormal investigators whose work inspired "The Conjuring."

In his first budget address to lawmakers, Democratic Gov. Tom Wolf laid out an ambitious $33.8 billion spending plan that raises taxes a combined 16 percent while slashing corporate and property taxes, restores cuts to education and wipes out the state's deficit.

Here we go again. The entire Lehigh Valley region, as well as parts of northern New Jersey will be under a winter weather advisory in effect from 3 p.m. Tuesday until 6 a.m. Wednesday for snow, sleet and freezing rain.